Is it regrexit or reglobalisation?

Steady jobs are less common. Time to admit that the benefits of globalisation have been a little patchy.

I remember earlier in the year I met a guy at a seminar. Let’s call him Jack. He was a good hard working bloke. He didn’t have a trade to stand by, and spent most of his life labouring.

We were chatting about his situation. He reckons he’s got 10 good years left in him. Maybe a little more if the knees hold out. What he really wants is a steady job. Something with a bit of security.

For the past ten years or so he’s been on the contract and casual treadmill. He was making ends meet. The jobs kept coming around. But they were always 3 months here, six months there. Even a few weeks at a time.

He had had a full time permanent job once, but he chucked it in to go travelling for a bit. He always figured the jobs would be there when he got back.

But they weren’t.

Somewhere there, the world changed.

And there’s no going back. The hard truth is that Jack will probably being doing contract work until his knees give out. And then maybe a few more years in a taxi after that (if taxis still exist).

Permanent full-time work is becoming less common, especially in manual and lower-skilled areas.

We’ve got i-pads and built in sat-navs, but we paid for it with security. And sometimes you don’t realise what you’ve got til its gone.

There’s been a lot of soul-searching on both sides of the politics after the election. The result didn’t cast anybody in a good light.

One of the interesting things to come out of it for me was the admission that Turnbull’s “Innovation Agenda” turned out to be a total dud.

I mean we all know as a policy it was just empty thought bubbles, but as a piece of spin, I thought it was alright. In fact, the early Turnbull got me excited. All his talk of rushing out to meet the future – no bunkering ourselves in and trying to “future proof” ourselves. Change could be exciting. Change could be an opportunity.

Turns out though, I was in the minority on that one.

For most people, it was a total turn-off.

In fact, it only seemed to promise to make things worse. It only promised to take the forces that had made life more stressful and unpredictable, and accelerate them. It promised to take the erosion of full-time permanent work, and stick a shiny ribbon on it.

In this sense, the “innovation agenda” was seen to be about opening ourselves up further to the tsunamis of the global economy, and making it even harder for the battlers like Jack who were battling already.

And there’s no political suicide in Australia like being ‘anti-battler’.

So people didn’t want an ‘innovation’ agenda. They wanted a “nice steady job like it’s 1983” agenda.

Now I’m a big believer in riding the chaos and making your own opportunities. But I’m not going to criticise people for being cautious about the future. People have just got to go with what they know.

And if everyone around you is being forced to work longer hours in more precarious working arrangements, it’s reasonable to ask if it’s all worth it.

And the reality is our ‘openness’ creates winners and losers.

If you’re a bearded hipster graphic designer with a unique set of globally marketable skills, the information age has been a boon. If you work in finance, you’ve probably done well, as the finance sector continues to bloom like mould on the back of a couch. If you had skills you could sell to a mine you also probably did well… for a while.

Or if you happened to own a bank or a multinational corporation, forget it! You’ve had a whale of a time.

But if you’re a garden-variety labourer like Jack, it’s harder to point to where the benefits are exactly.

This chart here sums it up perfectly. This is where global income growth has gone over the past twenty years or so.

There’s two surges of income growth. If you were middle class in an emerging economy like China, you’ve gone great guns. You’ve seen an explosion in earnings and wealth.

Likewise, if you were in the global top 1% – the people who own the banks and run massive companies, you having so much fun you’re blowing champagne out your nostrils.

But look at the hole around the 80th percentile. This is poorer workers in rich countries. They’re still rich on a global scale, but they’ve seen almost no income growth over the past twenty years.

So globalisation’s been great if you lived in a poor country, or you were super rich. If not, then things have just gotten more unstable and less predictable, without a whole lot else to show for it.

So tell me again why I need an ‘innovation agenda’?
The picture is grim. The good news I guess is that there are options. We’re working with Jack and he’s got a solid strategy in place. In a few years we should have him out of casual work and into something better. As a professional property investor he’ll still be working for himself, but the income will probably be a lot more predictable.

But Jack is super keen, and property investing isn’t for everyone. The harsh reality is that there is no going back.

So there is still a need for leadership to take the country into that brave and courageous space, and away from the time-lords who promise to somehow take us back to the golden years.

But that leadership is not about lecturing people to be braver. It starts with recognising that things have been tough for a lot of people, and providing a vision for how they can fit and contribute to this brave new world.

Comments

Very interesting Jon.
Unfortunately, all our Governments are controlled by those vested interests who control the banks and investment in major infrastructure.
The politicians soon find that their good intentions of striving on behalf of the electorate have to be tempered, to fit in with their real masters’ expectations.
It is very hard for them to improve the lives of people, but very easy for them to have the opposite effect – as we have seen in recent years.

This is the new normal. Our whole work structure is changing. We’d better get used to it.
Our education systems and curricula also need to undergo complete overhauls. They still teach the last century and last millennium model of people going to school, going to uni and getting a degree and then getting a job and working for someone else. That model is now outdated.
It would be good to remember that just over 100 years ago we were almost all entrepreneurs or business owners. This whole “working for someone else” model is just a recent phenomenon.
We are reverting back to that mean and also many jobs that exist now won’t exist 10 years from now. Things we think might be safe like accountancy and law are being replaced by technological advances such as artificial intelligence and robotics and automation are also making other jobs redundant, particularly in low paying repetitive areas.
But new jobs or careers are being created as we speak. A few years ago who had heard of social media managers, content creators and managers or app developers? And most of these people will work for themselves. The biggest growth area for work is the so called small or micro business or solopreneur. They’ll work from home or go to co sharing workspaces and the whole world is their potential customer.
I think it’s exciting, but many people who are not prepared for this will be left behind. Hardly surprising when the amount of information in the world now doubles roughly every 18 months or so, when 50 years ago it took 25 years for information to double.

I would agree with Kathy on most terms. I would like to add that all we are seeing today has been brewing last couple of centuries. Greed has grown out of proportion and most people are left behind in new developments. We are witnessing shift in global producer-consumer relationship. Western countries are becoming more consumer ones and eastern (particularly China) on the opposite side- producer. If future lies within boundaries of production and growth – which is a paramount of rich economies- than we can all see where it is going. It might be worthwhile to say that computerization and internet are in to help consumer world in creating life in a holographic world- temporary well off, whilst the gist of the progress is missing. I hope that we will be able to balance the outcome for universal benefit. Let’s see what speedy information exchange can do for us.

We all know that the world is changing, it always has, except now the speed is much faster than before…. we can’t change that process so we just have to find a way to adapt. If we don’t we’ll be left behind.

In comparison to just 2 generations ago our lives are so much better. In the West women & children dying in childbirth is an exception rather than a common occurrence. We don’t have disabling diseases such as Polio or smallpox. We have access to all the food that we want, we don’t know what scarcity is. We can live in our homes & walk the streets without fear.

Are there problems with our system… yes of course, it’s run by humans with different interests. Are we as a society much better off than 50 or 60 years ago, I would say definitely. I think that we need to put things perspective & appreciate the great advances that have occurred to allow us to live our lives with freedom & opportunity…. medically, politically, financially.

I’ve spent some time in Africa, with the locals & I have seen 1st hand the corruption in all levels from the police right through to politicians. Without having money or being a part of a powerful family you have little chance of creating anything for yourself.

The graph that John presented doesn’t surprise me. If you are in a secure job & have a reasonably good life then what pressure are there on you to change? None. As technology changes the way we work those in secure job just yearn for it to stay the same, looking for ways to maintain what they have not to adapt to the new world.

In developing countries they have the desire that our ancestors had to create a better life for themselves & their kids & they are working towards creating that & technology is just making that change faster for them.

I’m not a economist but I would imagine that if our banking system wasn’t strong & if the big companies weren’t profitable that our capitalist society would crumble. We have so much opportunity in Australia to create what we want, lets just get out & do it & use the technology that we have to make this happen faster in our lives.

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